jdg

Yes, it is possible. Use a mixture of various in app purchases and only display the appropriate ones to the end user based on their locale.

Note, it's not possible (afaik) to determine their country based on any hard data from iTunes, as you are not privy to any account information or sales receipts (for the initial download) from that user. That means you will have to rely on the user to choose their country.

Yes, but you're responsible for creating all of the graphics for it. Including the keys, and the background of the keys.

Dude, you even named it after the parent site?

Poor form.

I created Boxcar (http://boxcar.io), which has sent out 58 million push notifications. I've talked to every push notification provider out there, and the guys from UA are the best at what they do.

Without a moment of hesitation, I would strongly recommend choosing them over rolling your own. They're great guys, know what they're doing, and are having fun doing it.

No.

Love it. Awesome idea and prior to seeing this I hadn't even considered getting a case for my iPhone.

Very cool, great work.

So they get a phone call about three20 usage, and I get a rejection? Beautiful.

Love the consistency.

Very cool. Love what you guys are doing at Superfeedr. Keep up the great work! Hopefully we can meet at the RT CrunchUp next week.

j

EY's cloud services are great. I'm using it for Boxcar (http://boxcar.io) with a decent amount of traffic. The ease of adding additional instances make it an excellent service. Should you need it, their support guys are sharp.

If you're by chance already familiar with their filesystem layout, you'll feel right at home. If not, no worries - it's not hard to figure out where things persist at. You can write your own custom chef recipes if you have any requirements outside of the standard "here's the list of gems and *nix packages I need installed."

I've used Heroku in the past for "toy" projects, since it's just so damn easy to get something online. It's just lacking, though once you end up doing anything outside of the norm.

Eh, this game is being pirated more than the average app.

From what I heard at Greg Yardley (PinchMedia)'s talk at 360idev yesterday, the average piracy rate is 34%. My personal experience with Boxcar lines up with those numbers, along with a 0.056% conversion rate from pirated to paid. The "average" there, again according to PinchMedia, is 0.043% or 1 in 233.

They're taking the right approach in that, well, the truth is if someone is going to pirate something then even if you try and dissuade them they'll just move on to the next one. In my particular case, I send a push notification letting them know we've detected that they are using a pirated copy, and then disable their account. If they purchase the legitimate version, their account will automatically be re-enabled.

If I didn't have a backend server with monthly hosting costs, I wouldn't care that the application was being pirated. They use it, then move on. Based on the conversion rates I've seen myself and have heard of from others, it's just not worth the effort to try and get someone to purchase it.

Those conversion rates also invalidate the entire "I'm just trying it before buying it" argument, which is complete bullshit.

Pirates discuss it on Twitter: http://twitpic.com/jor06

And I also get emails about it -- angry ones: http://jdg.net/post/160979167/retard

http://jdg.net/post/151845213/some-people-just-amaze-me-unfo...

http://jdg.net/post/142912680/yep-dont-buy-this-piece-of-cra...

thanks! while the majority of people have been perfectly fine with the in-app purchases, it's unfortunate that a vocal minority haven't been.

getting slammed in itunes 2-3 times because someone doesn't want to pay an extra $1 for a new service is just lame.

9 out of 10 support requests for my app come from jailbroken users. About 1/3 are actual cracked copies; I can tell, because they register with our API server and the app sends along little bits of goodies. I ignore those, other than a "Buy a legitimate copy and I'll be more than happy to help you."

The other 2/3's are crashes from jailbroken devices. Directly caused by SBSettings. In fact, having the users go in and turn everything off in SBSettings usually fixes it.

So that's why jailbroken devices suck. It's not about "making it work the way they want", it's about having a stable environment for your applications to run in.

because having to reconnect it would be as equally annoying?

That's the cool thing about getting someone else to ghost write for you: it usually comes out better.

;)

I bet you could build it in a weekend, too?

Correct.

The problem here is, I didn't have a web page embedded in my app. Nor a browser. Nada.

Greg Yardley of PinchMedia asked earlier - Does this mean that any app that displays advertising w/ a built in browser should be rated 17+? In my opinion: absolutely.

Internet capable means access to the internet, period. There is no built in web browser, nor any content provided to users of this application other than the content that they themselves have placed. They will never see anyone else's content, nor will anyone see theirs.

Thats why this is such a big deal. It's ridiculous and to the point of being extreme, rather than making smart decisions about what should and should not be allowed.

It is - very soon. v1.1 was submitted last Monday evening, which includes support for Twitterfon, Twittelator and Twinkle. Plus a small bug fix.

Multiple accounts will most likely make it into v1.2, as long as Apple doesn't surprise me and approve v1.1 before this weekend.

j

(and, thanks for buying it :)

>> User.count >= XYZ

... no, really. :)

In order to poll Twitter, each device registers itself on our server. Passes in the oauth token etc. So I can keep a consistent watch on things server side, but actually verify the legitimate sales (vs. pirated copies) the next day, once the daily reports are available.

Well, DF linked to my latest app Boxcar (http://boxcar.io) today, which does push notifications for Twitter @mentions and DMs.

As far as what it did for sales with just that short little blurb? Awesome. That's what it did. :)

I can post actual growth percentages tomorrow once I have confirmed the data from Apple vs. my own analytics. It certainly made my day!

Wasn't it determined awhile back, that if you provide access to any UGC at all, you should ensure that you have a mature (or whatever it is, can't remember what the screen says now) rating?

E.g., - All Twitter clients. All forum readers. Chat rooms. Anything of the sort. That'd include Wikipedia, of course.

j

I don't believe it's spammy, and if my comment felt that way please excuse the snark. It wasn't intentional.

I believe it's less about how you get the post right and more about who you're asking. As I mentioned above, you need to talk to the people that are already using something similar to what you're... going to build?

Since you're not getting much feedback here, let me be the bird of encouragement that is sitting on your shoulder right now. Find people who you think would have a need for this, and talk to them. Those people apparently are not on HN. Ask the app review sites how they keep up and where they get their feeds from. It's a start!

The same name he submitted this one under. See his response below. He also didn't mention that he'd already posted it previously until after I had submitted my response. Or I missed it because of the blind rage I felt when he posted it the third time. Just kidding.

I do doubt that he is asking the wrong crowd -- at least, at first. "Would anyone be interested in me building this?" vs "Hey, I built this. Anyone have a use for it?" are two very different questions. Since there are already people with working solutions in place, and they're easy enough to find, your first initiative should be to either a) build it for yourself or b) find out what problems they already have and how to eloquently solve them.

In short, he needs to find people that already have a need for it. As to whether or not they read HN, who knows. A direct email is a much better method of contact, though.

You've posted this, what, 3 times now?

You may be asking the wrong crowd. Try e-mailing some of the app review sites etc. to see what they use currently and how it can be improved.

Terrible headline.

It's the only choice Amazon has at the moment. It's not Amazon sending a message to Apple or anything of the sort.

In short: Who gives a shit? Apple doesn't.

Where are you getting your data from?

Something I've been musing over for the last few days has been whether or not this will help raise prices in the app store.

Or will "push" be an add-on, purchased for $4.99/mo/yr via the new in-app store.

As cstejerean said, "no shit, servers cost money."

In any event, there are new ways coming to make your money back. Ars may be looking at this within the context of the current app store. Looking at it from what will be available in the near future changes the game a bit more.

I for one will be raising prices on my apps, whether that cost is up front or via an in-app purchase after a short trial. We're not selling apps to lose money.

Yes, it is the language used to create iPhone applications.

Yes, the language is probably becoming more popular as more developers learn it, in order to create iPhone applications.

Since iPhone applications are still relatively new, and haven't hit their stride yet, book sales will increase rather than staying steady.

Ruby on the other hand has been "popular" for at least two years now, and it's natural to see a "decline" in book sales, even though the number of developers entering the ruby world may remain the same.

The other thing to keep in mind is that Ruby is relatively easy to pick-up and run with, while Objective-C is, uh, a bit more "complex" (for lack of a better word).

I just verified this -- the information is accurate.

It's account wide, not on a per app basis. The exact text is:

"You can still add 79 out of the maximum 100 devices allocated for your team."

I removed a device and the text remained -- 79 out of 100. I'll check again later to see if it's not a caching issue.

Cool.

So what frameworks did you use to build it? Are you using pure Obj-C sqlite access, or something like fmdb/pldatabase/sqlitepersistentobjects?

What was the most challenging aspect of building it?

How will you market it? The app store is great, but I've found that outside visibility has started to matter even more now that there are tons of apps.

Also, you may want to change your application name in iTunes Connect to "hContacts - Highrise for your iPhone/iPod Touch" or something similar. Just be sure to have "Highrise" in it, so that your app name shows up in the table list when users are searching for the term "highrise" from their devices.

Not to take away from your review, but for those people that use Basecamp I have a native iPhone client here: http://appremix.com/projects/